Twenty Thousand Hertz, an award-winning and quite simply a terrific podcast announced a new season last week. The first episode of the new season was released on October 7th and titled "Tyrannosaurus FX," exploring the real and synthetic sounds of dinosaurs.In that first episode, host Dallas Taylor asked the key question: How do we know what an extinct dinosaur sounded like?
In the second episode, just released a few days ago, host Dallas Taylor launches an investigation into perfect pitch. Commonly (mis)perceived as the pinnacle of musicianship, people with perfect or "absolute" pitch have the ability to identify a specific musical note without any external reference. Pretty great, right?
We've all met people with perfect, or more appropriately, absolute, pitch. They can sing a note exactly in tune while we struggle to complete the first verse of Happy Birthday without sounding like a wounded duck. They can reproduce any note they hear on a variety of musical instruments and they can even tell you what key your microwave is beeping in.
Breathe easier, however, because in the episode we learn that neither Paul McCartney, Beyoncé nor Tchaikovsky have it, and in addition to the extraordinary talent comes the instinct to hear every single noise as precise notes on the chromatic scale, whether it's the whir of a coffee grinder or the beeps of a microwave. It's a rare gift that few people have, and while scientists still don't fully understand it, Twenty Thousand Hertz host Dallas Taylor asks if it's a blessing, curse, or maybe both.
Alongside producer and writer Olivia Rosenman, the episode features special contributions from neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who authored This Is Your Brain on Music and has worked with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Grateful Dead. Most of the piece, however, includes mind-blowing demonstrations and insight from four-time Grammy-winning phenom Jacob Collier. He describes the ways perfect pitch has influenced his performance and processing, from shifting between 10 different instruments on stage, to using household objects as parts of his songs, recognizing how many hundredths of a semitone he's singing out of tune, discovering secret notes and more.
Listeners also learn that it's possible to have perfect pitch with zero musical training, and that animals like wolves use it to keep track of their pack.
In August Twenty Thousand Hertz became part of a new family of podcasts being launched by TED. The series then announced it would expand
from its bi-weekly format to a weekly schedule, sharing twice the amount
of episodes for the month of October.
Twenty Thousand Hertz is dedicated to telling award-winning, millions-downloaded stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds, elevating our hearing to the same level of importance we give our other four senses.
As podcasts about music have proliferated in recent years (Switched On Pop, Slate's Hit Parade, Song Exploder), Twenty Thousand Hertz alone explores the deep regions of sound and our sonic world.
Where else can you listen to a podcast that weekly discusses sonic nerdfests like how the Netflix distinctive sound was created to a famous silent music composition called 4'33'' and even the fart sounds make by a whoopee cushion.
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